Its taken me awhile to warm up to

Its taken me awhile to warm up to the idea of using my iPhone as a camera but I’m finally starting to enjoy the immediacy I have and all the fun and funky apps that let me manipulate the less-than-high-quality images into something interesting.

Thanks to apps like Hipstamatic ($1.99 with additional “packs” for about $0.99) and Instagram (FREE), I can add texture, blur, smudges, dirt and then process my images into black-and-white, “infrared” or a myriad of other combinations. As a result of so many options, I really needed a cheat sheet to help me figure it all out. That’s where Photojojo steps in with their Ultimate Hipstamatic Guide featuring 366 different images showing all the possible combinations using Hipstamatic.

Instagram is a little easier to use since each effect is a package of image treatment and border but it has great sharing options. Each image can be immediately uploaded to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and several other services as well as keeping a feed of your contacts’ images that have been posted via Instagram right in the application. Instagram recently added a tilt-shift function that lets you control where and how much blur is in your images too.

(The image above utilized the tilt-shift feature in Instagram and the Earlybird filter)